Imagine going to work for a company where each day you exercise your skills, doing 40-60 hours in a week, but at the end of that week, the organization that owns that company takes your pay cheque.  On top of that, imagine making tips, but they have to take that as well because it would become a conflict of interest.  That is what the NCAA is doing to their student athletes each and every year since college athletics began.

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The reason student athletes don’t currently get paid is because it is a breach of NCAA regulations.  Per Senator Chris Murphy, he writes, “College sports has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry where everyone’s getting rich except the students actually doing the work” (2019).  The reason the NCAA has released as to why athletes don’t currently get paid is because it would create unfair advantages for different schools and conferences. A way that the NCAA could even this out would be to allocate ‘X’ amount to each school like a salary cap to be spent and distributed throughout the conferences and teams evenly. But this also leads me to believe that it could even the playing field in a sense.  It would allow for schools to be more competitive in pursuing student-athletes.  Another issue with the system in place currently is that for these student-athletes, they are unable to work regular jobs because if given any sort of tips, or if it was deemed their wages for whatever reasons were inflated, or simply they got given the job because of who they are, the NCAA can rule an investigation and then suspend the student-athlete.  For many, this leaves no options but to focus strictly on sport and school.  Senator Murphy also states a point I made two posts ago that, “The current system does more to advance the financial interests of broadcasters, apparel companies, and athletic departments than it does for the student-athletes who provide the product from which everyone else profits” (2019).

A video that goes very in depth into this, is linked below:

Francis, I. (2019, July 26). Why Aren’t College Athletes Paid? Retrieved from https://thecollegepost.com/college-athletes-pay/